The 74th Melbourne International Film Festival takes place from August 6–23, featuring more than 300 films, shorts, immersive experiences and special events.
Green Left film buffs Jake Maison and Jordan Shukri AK Armaou-Massoud have put together their selection of festival films that are sure to be of interest to Green Left readers.
* * *
American Doctor (2026)
Directed by Poh Si Teng
93 mins
American Doctor is the directorial debut of journalist and producer Poh Si Teng and focuses on three doctors — Mark Perlmutter, Feroze Sidhwa and Thaer Ahmad — as they attempt to reconcile their experiences of working in Palestine’s Gaza Strip in late 2024 and early 2025. Focusing on the inequalities of privilege experienced by the three men, American Doctor is a challenging and important documentary.
Ben’lmana (2026)
Directed by Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo
101 mins
Ben'Imana is an unflinching portrait of a community in the rural Rwandan village of Kibeho, in 2012, seeking closure and justice for the 1994 genocide. Dusabejambo's debut film draws on interviews with genocide victims and testimonies from community-based tribunals known as Gacaca courts. The testimonies are delivered by a cast of non-professional actors and evoke the difficulty for individuals and communities to reconcile and forgive.
Chronicles From the Siege (2026)
Directed by Abdallah Alkhatib
94 mins
In a war zone without a name, a group of locals break into a boarded-up video store while its owner, a former filmmaker named Arafat, scavenges for food and medicine. Palestinian-Syrian director and long-time human rights activist Abdallah Alkhatib builds a drama that mixes harsh reality with the drive to find joy, even amidst the horrors of war.
Dead Tongue (2025)
Directed by José Jiménez
25 mins
Dead Tongue follows a farmer who wanders a burned-out wasteland with his dogs, struggling to confront his past as an apprentice to the Chilean secret police. This experimental short film utilises its black-and-white gradient as a powerfully elegant motif representative of the capacity for atrocity and trauma and the destruction of our world.
Everybody to Kenmure Street (2026)
Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra
98 mins
Set against the backdrop of an immigration raid in a residential street in Glasgow in which two local men are taken, Everybody to Kenmure Street tells the story of a neighbourhood that defied authority in the name of what is morally right. Haunted by his decision to abstain from the protests, director Felipe Bustos Sierra commemorates a day of spontaneous solidarity through a mosaic of crowd-sourced testimonies, archival fragments and self-aware dramatisations.
Decorado (2025)
Directed by Alberto Vazquez
95 mins
Decorado, which translates as “theatre set”, is an animated black comedy starring a middle-aged unemployed mouse named Arnold who begins to suspect that the town he lives in isn't real. Director Alberto Vasquez expertly weaves a sense of menace evocative of 1984 with the sense of existential dread often felt when reading the news.
Do You Love Me (2025)
Directed by Lana Daher
75 mins
Combing through 20,000 hours of footage from more than 70 years, director Lana Daher sets out to create a national archive for Lebanon. Stitched together from still photos, home movies, news reports and pop-culture ephemera, Do You Love Me is a testament to Lebanese collective memory that is heartwarming and harrowing.
Elephants in the Fog (2026)
Directed by Abinash Bikram Shah
108 mins
Equal parts crime saga and dramatisation of the threat to transgender rights in South Asia, Elephants in the Fog follows a Kinnar (transgender, intersex, third-gender) matriarch who is forced to make an impossible decision after her adoptive daughter disappears. Bikram Shah's directorial debut is an authentically fierce work of queer defiance against disenfranchisement and selective community.
Facing the Numbers (2026)
Directed by Tyson Perkins and Kieran Satour
74 mins
First Nations people are disproportionately more likely to be separated from their families, incarcerated and become victims of police brutality. Sharing the voices of members of the Stolen Generations, those who have lost family members to deaths in custody and survivors of violence in custody, this mixture of memoir, music video, poetry, dance, journalism and activism lends space to the personal stories behind experience of disadvantage and institutionalised violence.
Human Resource (2025)
Directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
122 mins
Human Resource follows Fren, an HR manager in Bangkok who — between the demands of her job, the clashing personalities of her co-workers and frustrating husband — begins to question if she should tell them that she is pregnant. Exploring work and environmental issues, Thamrongrattanarit captures the calculating callousness with which corporations treat their employees.
Lost Land (2025)
Directed by Akio Fujimoto
99 mins
Somira and her little brother Shafi are forced to undergo an uncertain and dangerous odyssey from a Bangladeshi refugee camp to Malaysia in search of their uncle. Spoken entirely in Rohingya, Lost Land intimately approaches Somira and Shafi's story in a way that compels the audience to do more than bear witness to the children's confusion and determination.
The Match (2026)
Directed by Santiago Franco and Juan Cabral
91 mins
Set amidst the 1986 FIFA world cup quarter-final match between England and Argentina in Mexico following the Falklands War, The Match follows Diego Maradona's infamous “hand of God” goal followed by his “goal of the century” and the unprecedented turmoil that followed. The documentary juxtaposes exquisite monochrome shots with lively archival footage of the match in vivid colour, reinvestigating the historic moment as well as the relationship between geopolitics and sports.
Species (2026)
Directed by Marion Le Corroler
103 mins
Margot, a young intern in France's most prestigious emergency department, notices strange symptoms in patients her age, as her own body begins to exhibit alarming transformations. Through the lens of body-horror, director Marion Le Corroller delivers a savage critique of “rise-and-grind” productivity culture and its deleterious effects on the human body.
Sukundimi Walks Before Me (2026)
Directed by Lachlan McLeod and Matasila Freshwater
93 mins
This powerful documentary follows an indigenous Papuan community campaigning to preserve its future after an Australian mining conglomerate announces plans to build a huge mine and toxic waste dam on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Directors Lachlan McLeod and Matasila Freshwater’s collaboration is an intimate study of community and a David versus Goliath work of cinematic activism.
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep (2026)
Directed by Rakan Mayasi
100 mins
Between Israeli missile strikes and civil war lurking in Syria beyond the mountains, sisters Reem and Jawaher live in a Bedouin tribe in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and face being married off to appease intertribal politics, regardless of their own dreams and goals. Director Rakan Mayasi's first feature film is boldly shot without a script and performed by a cast of non-professional actors. It draws on Mayasi's grandmother's own accounts, organically interrogating ritual and entrenched patriarchy.
The authors also recommend the following shorts, which include documentaries by First Peoples filmmakers exploring Treaty: A Soil A Culture A River A People, Coconut, Coyotes, Dya [Country], Land of Barbar, Protest on the Dancefloor and Queens to the front.
[View the full program at miff.com.au.]